Family Britain, 1951-1957 (18 page)

It was not just Tory and Liberal grandees who were alarmed, but also the bulk of Labour MPs, including one of the youngest. ‘It is a great pity,’ observed Anthony Wedgwood Benn, ‘that those who are understandably suspicious of monopoly should automatically extend their suspicions to public service broadcasting itself. That is quite a different matter.’ On the sparsely represented other side, the most striking contribution was by Hughie Green, a child star of the 1930s who after the war had remade his name presenting
Opportunity Knocks
on the radio. Writing from 169 Chiltern Court, NW1, he extolled the drama available to watch on commercial TV in the States: ‘Great plays, star names, excellent direction, and a variety of sets in a fleeting hour can be compared with – in this country – one dreary set and a torrent of words that seem to go on to eternity.’ About television in general he added: ‘Its main aim in a democratic country should be the same as that of any advertiser – to please the public. Why this great outcry against the advertiser? The British free Press seem to get along with him very well.’ In the same issue, however,
The Times
called for the BBC’s monopoly to be upheld, largely on the basis that it was now ‘a proven British institution’.

The White Paper on 15 May did confirm the monopoly in sound broadcasting, but left the way open for a commercial television competitor. In the House of Lords later that month, Lord Reith – in the public mind still the figure overwhelmingly identified with the BBC – claimed that the introduction of commercial television would be a national disaster comparable to ‘dog-racing, smallpox and bubonic plague’. It was an intervention that infuriated Churchill. ‘I am against the monopoly enjoyed by the BBC,’ he told his physician Lord Moran soon afterwards. ‘For eleven years they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views which proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialists – probably with Communists.’ In a fairly humdrum Commons debate in June, Herbert Morrison claimed that there would be ‘a competitive drive in a downward direction’, while John Profumo spoke for the vanguard of Tory MPs in favour of such competition: ‘We are not a nation of intellectuals. The average men and women who form the vast majority of the public deserve the best possible entertainment. We are not a nation of old-fashioned die-hards, and the Government should foster a spirit of experiment . . . If there is any doubt about what the people really desire, surely the answer is to try it out and allow the people to find out for themselves.’ Going somewhat over the top, he also pronounced himself ‘horrified by the philosophy which recognises a State-run organisation as the sole arbiter of our taste and even our entertainment’. His reward was a decisive majority, on a whipped vote, in favour of the White Paper. It was not yet a done deal, but for the three hard-headed men – the former BBC executive Norman Collins, the free-market stockbroker and electrical magnate Sir Robert Renwick and C. O. Stanley of Pye Radio – at the heart of the campaign to break the monopoly, this was a sweet moment.

What did the people want? ‘The Parties have got sponsoring all wrong,’ Hugh Cudlipp, soon to become the dynamic Editorial Director of the
Daily Mirror
and
Sunday Pictorial
, told Crossman shortly after the Commons vote. ‘The staunchest Tory supporters are all against it but a large number of people who vote Labour would really like sponsored variety programmes.’ Crossman himself reflected: ‘I’m sure that this is true in Coventry [his constituency], where most of my supporters would love sponsored programmes.’ Although Gallup found opinion evenly divided – roughly one-third in favour of a new television channel sponsored by advertisers, one-third against, one-third undecided – the instincts of Cudlipp and Crossman were surely correct. Morrison may have worried that television was something ‘we can have too much of’, claiming that ‘when listening and looking it is impossible for anyone to work or read, although women can knit’, but almost invariably once people started watching they were hooked – and wanted more. ‘I am very interested in television as a viewer,’ an engine-driver member of the BBC’s Viewing Panel wrote in during the spring. ‘It must have altered the habits of thousands of working people, as it has mine. It has opened a vista of sights scenes and educational items to which we could never have aspired. I no longer listen to radio, I rarely go out in the evenings, I have visited the cinema once in 18 months.’ He added a postscript: ‘I have also resigned my seat on the Town Council, and politics.’9

One of the new medium’s great attractions, of course, was its coverage (though still somewhat patchy) of major sporting events. In a memorable Derby, the 16-year-old Lester Piggott was ruthlessly outmanoeuvred by the veteran Charlie Smirke on Tulyar, the triumphant winning jockey taunting Piggott by saying, ‘What did I Tulyar?’ as he dismounted; in the First Test at Headingley against India, England took the field under its first-ever professional captain, Len Hutton, who had a formidable weapon in his fiery fast bowler Fred Trueman – rugged, quick-tongued, no lover of the old guard; and in the Olympics at Helsinki, just as it seemed that Britain was going to go home without a gold medal, Colonel Harry Llewellyn jumped a clear round on Foxhunter, best-loved British horse of the era. There were other entertainments available in August. Churchill one evening went to see
The Yeomen of the Guard
at Streatham and, according to ‘Jock’ Colville, who accompanied him, ‘was received with immense acclamation by the audience’; the American singer Frankie Laine was an instant sell-out at the London Palladium, though an unimpressed Tynan noted in his review how ‘he spreads his arms out like a wrestler, and then hits a mad, toneless head-note, holding it so long that you expect him to drop like a stone at the end of it’; and the northern comedian Frank Randle continued to break all records at the Central Pier, Blackpool, with his twice-nightly
Randle’s Summer Scandals
. It was not, though, a trouble-free summer for Randle, long the target of Blackpool’s Chief Constable Harry Barnes, a strong Methodist. Eventually, Barnes got him summonsed on four charges of obscenity, with the police identifying the part of the show they objected to:

A silent Chinaman shuffled across the stage. Randle asked the audience, ‘Is that King Farouk?’

CINDERELLA, to Buttons (Randle): ‘I’d like to do you a favour.’

BUTTONS: ‘A’d rather have a boiled egg.’

   And CINDERELLA again: ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

BUTTONS: ‘It’s nowt to do with me. It’ll be me father agin.’

And finally, ‘There’s a flea loose in the harem and the favourite will have to be scratched.’

Found guilty on all counts, Randle was fined £10 on each summons, with fines also for the rest of the cast and the theatre manager.10

There was one dreadful natural disaster during the summer. ‘Deaths about 30 [in the end 34] in Lynmouth, the holiday makers and the villagers equally in flood,’ recorded Harold Macmillan on Sunday, 17 August, after a deluge had broken over Exmoor. ‘Apparently this happened on Friday night, but was not in Saturday’s newspapers. As we never listen to the wireless, I had not heard the BBC account on Saturday night.’ Over the next few days the BBC, the press and the newsreels all gave blanket coverage to the tragedy, though Churchill was not deterred from going to his Gilbert and Sullivan on Monday evening. By then Macmillan, as Housing Minister, was in north Devon, where he spent Tuesday morning surveying the spectacular damage and persuading the locals ‘to concentrate on getting immediate work done before arguing as to exactly who is to pay’. Although criticised in some quarters for his extravagant language (‘like the road to Ypres’) and dress (cloth cap and walking stick), Macmillan himself believed that his visit had been ‘very well received’.11

Soon afterwards, in early September, Raymond Chandler arrived in London for a month’s stay. There were some pleasingly Chandleresque touches in his letters back home. ‘Today is an English Sunday and by God it’s gloomy enough for a crossing of the Styx,’ he told his publisher. ‘I thought England was broke but the whole damn city is crawling with Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Daimlers and expensive blondes.’ And, no doubt reflecting the cuisine at the Connaught, he added: ‘Never thought I’d get sick of the sight of a grouse on toast or a partridge, but by God I am.’ Even so, by the time he got back to California and sent his report to his old Dulwich College contemporary Bill Townend, his overall verdict was favourable: ‘The present generation of English people impressed me very well. There is a touch of aggressiveness about the working classes and the non-Public School types which I think is something new and which I personally do not find at all unpleasant . . . And the real Public School types, or many of them, with their bird-like chirpings are becoming a little ridiculous.’

There was nothing sanguine about ‘Love is Dead’, the opening essay of John Betjeman’s
First and Last Loves
, a mainly architectural collection published in September. ‘We are told that we live in the age of the common man,’ he declared:

He would be better described as the suburban man. There is a refinement about him which pervades everything he touches and sees. His books are chosen for him by the librarian, his arguing is done for him by Brains Trusts, his dreams are realised for him in the cinema, his records are played for him by the B.B.C. . . . He collects facts as some collect stamps, and he abhors excess in colour, speech or decoration. He is not vulgar. He is not the common man, but the average man, which is far worse.

He is our ruler and he rules by committees. He gives us what most people want, and he believes that what is popular is what is best. He is the explanation of such phenomena as plastic tea-cups, Tizer, light ale, quizzes, mystery tours, cafeterias, discussion groups, Chapels of Unity, station announcers . . .

As for what the future held under this rule of the mediocre, Betjeman offered a startlingly uncuddly, dystopian vision:

I see the woman with a scarf twisted round her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She has put the tea tray down upon the file on which my future depends. I see the man on the chain-belt feeling tired, not screwing the final nuts. In a few months I see the engine falling out of the motor car. I see eight porters, two postmen and an inspector standing dazed for forty minutes on a provincial station, staring into space and waiting for what was once the Great Western which is now forty minutes late. I see those sharp-faced girls behind the buffet and the counter insulting the crowds who come to buy. Too bored to think, too proud to pray, too timid to leave what they’re used to doing . . . We know how many tons of coal are produced per week, how many man-hours there are in a pair of nylons, the exact date and the name of the architect and the style of a building. The Herr-Professor-Doktors [ie Pevsner] are writing everything down for us, sometimes throwing in a little hurried pontificating too, so we need never bother to feel or think or see again. We can eat our Weetabix, catch the 8.48, read the sports column and die; for love is dead.

‘One of the most savage Jeremiads on English life today that I have ever read,’ thought the architectural writer (and semi-Modernist) John Summerson. ‘It is a little embarrassing.’ But to the young, aggressive, left-wing art critic John Berger it was worse than that. ‘Why bother to consider the book at all?’ he asked in
Tribune
. ‘Because it shows, I think, how silly an imaginative and knowledgeable writer can become, if he loses touch with the real issues of the time.’

All too late, in any case, for Mahmood Hussein Mattan – a 28-year-old Somali seaman (and father of three) hanged in Cardiff Prison on 8 September for the murder in March of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper in the Cardiff docks area. The key prosecution witness was a carpenter called Harold Cover, subsequently convicted in 1969 of attempting to murder his own daughter. That failed to persuade the Home Secretary of the day, James Callaghan, to reopen Mattan’s case, but in 1998 the Court of Appeal did reconsider it and found that Mattan’s conviction could no longer be regarded as safe. ‘The court can only hope that its decision today will provide some crumb of comfort for his surviving relatives,’ said Lord Justice Rose. Mattan’s widow, Laura, though, was unappeased by the quashing of the conviction. ‘I’ll probably be angry until my dying day,’ she told reporters outside the court. ‘He has been cleared, but it should never have happened in the first place. He should have been cleared way back then.’12

‘Crikey’, ‘Yarooh’, ‘I say, you fellows’, ‘Leggo, you beasts’ – the soon familiar cries of the ‘Fat Owl of the Remove’ were first heard on television on the Tuesday after the King’s funeral. Initially, each episode of
Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
was screened twice, at 5.40 for children and then at 8.00 for adults, both times performed live. Significantly, the opening episode got an excellent Reaction Index (from the BBC’s Television Panel) of 79 for the earlier performance, but only 61 for the later. ‘There was some feeling among adults that the programme lacked some of the pace and rumbustiousness they associated with the original Billy Bunter stories, and there was a minority of viewers who do not share the view that the stories were worthy of television portrayal.’ The
Daily Sketch
, a right-wing tabloid, was more succinct, calling the programme ‘dull, dated, boring’. But for many children it was an irresistible draw, above all when the gimlet-eyed form-master Mr Quelch (initially played by Kynaston Reeves) uttered the irresistible words, ‘Bend over, you wretched boy,’ or when Bunter’s sadistic, snooty chums (Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh) tormented their fat, nouveau-riche schoolfellow. Did it worry them that Bunter was played by a padded-out 29-year-old actor (Gerald Campion, in his forties by the time of the last series in 1961)? Or that the world of Greyfriars School – first created in 1910 in the boys’ weekly
Magnet
by the prolific, indefatigable Frank Richards, who now wrote the television scripts – was so infinitely removed from the experience of most children? Probably not. Back in 1940, George Orwell had famously accused Richards of snobbishness, diehard Toryism and being stuck in an Edwardian time warp. ‘Human nature, Mr Orwell, is dateless,’ Richards had replied. ‘A character that lives is always up to date.’13